"Giorgione is regarded as a unique figure in the history of art: almost no other Western painter has left so few secure works and enjoyed such fame..." Sylvia Ferino-Pagden.

My website, MyGiorgione, now includes my interpretations of Giorgione's "Tempest" as "The Rest on the Flight into Egypt"; his "Three Ages of Man" as "The Encounter of Jesus with the Rich Young Man"; Titian's, "Sacred and Profane Love" as "The Conversion of Mary Magdalen"; and Titian's "Pastoral Concert" as his "Homage to Giorgione".

Monday, June 17, 2013

I am working on a new interpretation of the Louvre’s
“Pastoral Concert”, one of the most famous paintings of the Venetian
Renaissance. Variously attributed to Giorgione or Titian, no one has so far been
able to come up with a plausible explanation of its subject. Before publishing
the interpretation on my website, I would like to post some bibliographical
information here.

The December 1957 issue of The Journal of
Aesthetics and Art Criticism featured an essay on the painting by Philipp
Fehl entitled, “The Hidden Genre: a Study of the Concert Champetre in the
Louvre.”[i]
In his study Fehl limited himself to a discussion of the two female nudes in
the painting.

My present proposition is simply this: the two women
are not human. They are nymphs of the wood who, having been attracted by the
music and the charm of the young men, have joined their concert. They are as invisible to the young men as they are,
in the full beauty of the landscape which they bodily represent, visible to us. [157]

From this insight that was based primarily on an
extensive analysis of literary sources, Fehl drew the following conclusion
about the painting.

The picture, if we choose to look at it from this
point of view, is now a true pastoral, in the spirit of the idylls of
Theocritus. [157]

He did admit that a really convincing proof would
require a poem or text which, unfortunately, he had not been able to find.

However, a year later famed Art historian Edgar Wind
seemed to add his weight to Fehl’s description of the two nudes in Pagan
Mysteries of the Renaissance.[ii]

The
same 'philosophy of clothes' can be studied in Giorgione's 'Fete Champetre' in
the Louvre. The nymphs, distinguished from the musicians by the absence of
clothes, are meant to be recognized as 'divine presences', superior spirits
from whose fountain the mortal musicians are nourished…

Wind’s
comment was only in a footnote and one would suspect that he came upon Fehl’s
interpretation while his own book was in process of publication.

In
any event, in 1959 Patricia Egan took Fehl’s analysis a step further in an
essay, “Poesia and the Fete Champetre” that appeared in the Art Bulletin.[iii]
Egan also concentrated on the two nude females, but she regarded them as muses
rather than nymphs. They are sister beings who “constitute the first and strongest section of
the picture.”

the left side comprises the water-pouring “muse,”
the fine young lute-player, the white gabled building by the lake, and the
farther landscape; the enclosed landscape on the right side contains the
flute-playing ”muse,” the shepherd boy, the farmhouse, the grove, and the
goatherd with his flock. [305]

Egan found a contemporary “Tarocchi” card with an
image identified as “Poesia”. Although clothed, she carried the pitcher and
pipe (aulos) seen in the “Pastoral Concert”.

Tarocchi card C-27

Entitled Poesia, the girl is seated beside a
fountain on grass or leaves, using one hand to play a flute while with the
other she empties a pitcher into a small body of water at her side….If we
accept this degree of meaning to be implicit in the scene, we may add,
tentatively, to the titles already bestowed on the picture, that of “Allegory
of Poetry.” [304]

Egan admitted that the connections in the Tarocchi
card have become somewhat weaker in the “Pastoral Concert.” “Poesia” has
“twinned”, and each twin performs one of the actions depicted on the playing
card.

Poesia as the personification of academic eloquence
has twinned, and her actions, though simultaneous, no longer depend so closely
on one another. [312]

Although Egan identified the nudes as muses and not as
nymphs, she agreed with Fehl: the “muses’ belong to one world, the boys to
another, the world of Poetry includes them all.” [312]

In 2006 Jaynie Anderson, in the catalog entry for
the Bellini, Giorgione, Titian exhibition jointly sponsored by Washington’s
National Gallery and Vienna’s Kunsthistorisches Museum, noted the contributions
of Fehl and Egan, and claimed that their observations about the unworldly
nature of the two nudes were now generally accepted by scholars.[iv]
I fully agree and believe that in no way can these two females be considered as
girl friends or prostitutes.

However, in my interpretation of the “Pastoral
Concert” I go somewhat further and attempt to better identify the muses and
give a fuller account of what they are doing. Moreover, I will identify their
relationship with the two men. Finally, I will identify the two men. They are
the two central figures in the painting and only if they are identified, can we
begin to understand the subject.

Thursday, June 6, 2013

Entitled “Tiziano”, the Titian
exhibition at Rome’s Scuderie del Quirinale is a spectacular display of a
lifetime of work by the great Venetian Renaissance artist. My wife and I were
able to see it last week after spending some time in London where the National
Gallery has an outstanding collection of Titian and other Venetian masters. But
the Scuderie show was something else.

In his notes the curator of the
Tiziano exhibition wrote,

The aim of this exhibition is to
authentically reconstruct his sixty year artistic journey, bringing together
for the first time dozens of masterpieces, appropriately related to each phase
of the artist’s life. Thus in successive passages we may grasp his careful
evaluation of the tradition of Bellinian chromatic classicism and the
revolution of tonalism learnt from Giorgione, right down to that dynamism of
the painted surface which, together with extraordinary expressive force, opens
up to the most advanced modernity.

Titian: Self-Portrait, Prado

The collection Filled ten rooms on two floors of the Scuderie
and the curator decided to begin with a famous Titian self-portrait from the
Prado juxtaposed with a very large Martyrdom of St. Lawrence, a painting
revelatory of the old man in the self-portrait.

The ochre tonalities and the dark
brown shadows punctuate a composition rendered dramatic by the fire of the
braziers, by the rent sky. The expressive force is given by a colour no longer
with half tones: this is how Titian interprets the hagiographic story where the
Saint, tortured on the gridiron, proclaims, ‘my light has no darkness:
everything is resplendent with light.’

Titian: St. Lawrence

This painting set the stage for
the whole exhibition in another sense. The great majority of the paintings
throughout were of sacred or religious subjects. Throughout his long lifetime
Titian’s patrons were devoted to these subjects and looked to Titian to bring
out their full meaning.

The first two rooms, for example,
contained a Baptism of Christ (c. 1512); a Mystic Marriage of S. Catherine; the
famous Christ being dragged by what the translator calls a “rogue”; Pope
Alexander VI presenting a member of the Pesaro family to St. Peter; and three
Madonnas and Child including an altarpiece from the Vatican Museum that had
overwhelmed Goethe on his trip to Italy. Goethe wrote, “It shines before my
eyes more than any other picture I have seen to date.” The only exception was a
small so-called “Orpheus and Eurydice” that to my mind could easily be
re-interpreted as a “sacred” subject.

Room 3 contained more of the same
including three Crucifixions. One, attributed to Titian’s workshop, was
especially interesting since it depicted Christ on the Cross along with the
Good Thief. Usually Christ will either be alone or pictured between the two
thieves. But in this case only the two were shown side by side. Nothing seemed
to be holding the redeemed thief on his cross and he seemed to be about to fly
off of it in response to the words of Christ: “this day thou shall be with me
in Paradise.” A remarkable painting.

Rooms 4 and 5 contained an
Annunciation, the Sacrifice of Isaac, and a Deposition done for Phillip of
Spain around 1559. The latter was especially interesting to me because Titian
used an antique relief on a sarcophagus in a way similar to the one in the
Borghese Gallery’s “Sacred and Profane Love.” The relief contained images of
the sacrifice of Isaac and Cain and Abel, both symbolic of the sacrifice of
Christ.

In Rooms 6 and 7 we began to
experience the portraits for which Titian is so justly famous. Here we have
Pope Paul III, a man with a glove, and the famous “Flora” whose image also
graces the cover of the exhibition brochure as well as posters all over Rome.
The brochure calls her a Venetian beauty but I still believe she is Mary
Magdalene. She is only called Flora because of the flowers in her hand but she
has no other characteristics of the nymph.

Titian: Flora

Room 8 was devoted to State
portraits included a couple of Doges, but in room 9 we finally got to see some
of Titian’s paintings derived from ancient mythology. There was a Danae done
around 1544 and now in Naples, as well as the famous painting from the Borghese
Gallery of Venus blindfolding Cupid.

The curator used Room 10 to bring
the exhibition to an end and to recall its beginning. The “Flaying of Marsyas
recalled the “Martyrdom of St. Lawrence,” but the exhibition ended with another
self-portrait. This one from Berlin was done around 1562. Here is the curator’s
description.

In this Self-Portrait he
concentrates all the warmth of the picture in the head of the old man…It is the
pose of an unprecedented assertiveness where the table, pure point of light
becomes an expressive instrument for highlighting the figure which is not
turned towards the beholder but is gazing at a distant point with the intent
look of someone deep in thought.

It was a fitting end to a
magnificent exhibition. Not only were the paintings of the highest order but
also they were beautifully hung and lit. Wall descriptions were easy to read
and informative. My wife used the audio guide and thought it was excellent.
“Tiziano” must have been years in the making but it was well worth the effort.